BRINGING YOU THE FACTS....--You Never Knew,-You Needed to Know!----SNIPPETZ WEEKLY MAGAZINE

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IN THE NAME OF LOVE...POTIONS

“I didn’t know if it was day or nightI started kissing everything in sightBut when I kissed the copdown on Thirty-Fourth and VineHe broke my little bottle ofLove Potion Number Nine”– Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller,American songwriters

What is it about love that makes us all want it so darn much? No, we’re not talking about the love we have for our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, etc. We’re talking about that deep down, tear-your-heart-out, sick-to-your-stomach passionate love. If we didn’t know better, those two descriptions might make us reconsider our desire to be in love. It doesn’t exactly sound awesome, does it? But for those of us who have been lucky enough to fall in love with someone who loved us back, we know better. It’s an experience unlike any other. If it wasn’t, would Hollywood have been able to make a massive fortune on romantic comedies? We think not. Anyway, with love being on everyone’s mind this week – head’s up for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention but Valentine’s Day is the 14th – we thought it might be interesting to take a stroll back through history to see the different methods people developed to supposedly make someone fall in love with them. A love potion, if you will. Now, as usual, we at Snippetz don’t condone the use of these things, nor do we claim they even work. We are simply informing you, our dear readers, about mankind’s attempts to create a love connection with the help of a love potion or two. Enjoy!

STARTED WITH A KISS . . .OK, we don’t know that for certain and it’s fair to say that we’ll never be 100 percent sure that we’ve uncovered the first love potion ever concocted. What we do know is love potions have been around since at least the second century A.D. How do we know this? Well, a Roman writer and philosopher named Apuleius was actually taken to court for his use of an alleged love potion on a wealthy widow he snagged and subsequently married. The widow’s relatives, who brought the charges against Apuleius, claimed that the potion he used actually undermined the widow’s true wishes, causing her to fall in love with him when, under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have. However, the court ruled in favor of Apuleius.

​Perhaps that’s because the potion contained shellfish, spiced oysters, lobsters and cuttlefish. If the potion really worked the way the widow’s family claimed, those must have been some pretty potent marine animals!

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AND YOU THOUGHT LIVER AND ONIONS WAS BADThey say that if something is worth having, it’s worth working hard for. You know, you gotta put in a little blood, sweat and tears. Apparently, some people took this idea literally because more than just a few of the recipes call for some of the above mentioned bodily fluids to create an effective love potion.

For instance, a concoction that acted like a love potion but was actually a love cake, if you will, dates back to medieval times. These love cakes were baked according to specific instructions, namely that the person baking it must be naked. As weird as that may sound, it makes sense when you consider that the dough must be rubbed everywhere on the naked baker’s body, and when we say everywhere, we mean everywhere. The point was to get the naked baker’s sweat infused into the dough which was then baked and fed to the person whom the naked baker desired. It’s unclear if the bread was to be served by the naked baker while he or she was naked, but perhaps that upped the chances of a love connection developing.

If you thought the naked baker recipe was unsavory, you ain’t heard nothing yet! Other recipes – and yes, that is recipes plural, as in more than one – called for menstrual blood as a key ingredient. We’ll take a hard pass on that and just live our lives as lonely spinsters, thank you very much.

Saliva was commonly used as well, which is clearly illustrated by the following “potion”: “Mix together a chip of gold, a pinch of safe, a drop of charged witch’s saliva, a smooth rock obtained from a river bed, half a cup of rain water, a tea spoon of honey, a piece of tree bark such as witch hazel, a drop of vanilla, a drop of amber oil, a pinch of ginger, a pinch of table sugar and a handful of chocolate chips. Adding another body fluid will enhance the potency of it.”

Guys, there is so much wrong with that recipe. For starters, if you were to use witch’s saliva, that implies either you yourself are a witch or you know someone that is. Anyone remember the Salem Witch Trials? Yeah, we do too, and it seems fairly dangerous for someone to outright claim to be a witch, at least in those times. But what about the rock from a river bed? What if it’s not a river but a stream? Maybe we’re just too cynical, but this love potion sounds like a crock.

​Let’s not forget the ever-popular “Spanish fly”, a well-known ingredient obtained from the blister beetle. That ingredient has been around for a very, very long time, even though it contains 5 percent cantharidin, a chemical

that irritates animal tissues, including that of humans. In fact, it can cause permanent damage to the kidneys.​THE BOND BETWEEN A HUSBAND AND WIFE IS SACRED... AND WORMYHave you ever had an argument with your significant other and felt that the bond between the two of you was breaking or damaged? Well, never fear because a book written in the 1500s, called “The Boke of Secretes of Albertus Magnus of the Vertues of Herbes, Stones and Certaine Beastes” (yes, all those misspellings are accurate) has the answer! Simply crush – or more aptly, smash – earthworms and periwinkle into a meal for the two of you and voila! You’re back in love.

NOTHING SAYS LOVE LIKE LIZARDSA recipe from Nigeria actually calls for the neck of a lizard, finger nails, umbilical cord remnants, blood from a viper, and witch’s hair. One caveat – you must drink it while it’s still boiling.

Another recipe from the Philippines calls for a lizard drowned in urine as a key ingredient in the love potion. But apparently, that’s a slippery slope because another recipe from Nigeria calls for the same lizard-drowned-in-urine ingredient, mixed with wine. However, the results from that potion are anti-love. Well, excuse us!

LOVE KILLSThe quest for love has caused humans to do some pretty strange things, including using potentially poisonous ingredients in love potions. For instance, a common ingredient in love potions in India was the datura plant, also known as Jimson weed. It is a hallucinogen, which might be why it was used in the first place but can also be fatal. Allegedly, it was used on South American women to put them to sleep so they wouldn’t flip out when they were buried alive next to their chieftain husbands. Sounds great, where do we sign up?

THOSE GREEKS ARE AT IT AGAIN!It just wouldn’t be an article about historical love potions if we didn’t include something from Ancient Greece. Those people were all about things just like this . . . and apparently, one particular ingredient was so popular and widely-used that the Greeks literally used it to extinction! Satyrion or satirio was an orchid that was ground into a powder mixed with wine, which allegedly caused people to be “passionately and wildly in love.” It couldn’t have anything to do with the wine, could it? Just kidding. But in all truthfulness, the Greeks believed in the potion so ardently that the plant is completely extinct. Hey Greeks, why didn’t you save some for the rest of us??